You don't have a problem with migrants—unless you're a craven, lizard person politician
I’m back in New York after a long trip and I’m supposed to have a serious problem with migrants.
“82 percent of New Yorkers called the arrival of so many migrants a “serious problem,” with 58 percent saying it’s time to slow the flow,” writes a Farrah Stockman, of the New York Times editorial board. It’s sunny out. I have only two problems, and they are the loud construction next door and that the coffee I bought this morning cost $4.
I guarantee you that no New Yorker is having a literal problem with an asylum seeker right now. Is the F train late again? Nothing to do with migrants. Mentally ill homeless man screaming at you? Not a migrant. Rent too high? I bet there are forces at play unrelated to the recent surge of migrants. I know I’m being obnoxiously “cute.” But, you have to state the obvious. In the discourse around migration, things that seem “obvious”—or that are just true—aren’t. Since, let’s say the mid-20th century, Western publics have been lied to about the cultural and economic “costs” of migration. This is done to fuel the sadistic, twisted politics of electoral systems that periodically flip between some degree of “right” and “left.”
Let’s start with now. Asylum seekers are a problem for one New Yorker (or New Jerseyian) and that’s Mayor Eric Adams. Adams’ M.O. is to gin up panic about an issue and then blame everyone else when he does nothing to solve it. It happened with crime. By now it’s fairly clear that surges in criminal activity were influenced by the pandemic, the single, unique phenomenon of our lifetimes that impacted literally everyone in some way. BLM didn’t. In fact, BLM had depressingly little impact on policing longterm, yet remains that central go-to villain for tough-on-crime politicians and pundits.
Adams rode into office promising to wrangle the city’s crime problem into order. Then nothing he did really had an impact, even as he cemented policing practices—like the plainclothes units and stop-and-frisk—that will lead to a gruesome civilian death that, if captured on video, will galvanize a new round of protests. Anyway, anytime anything bad, crime-wise, happens in the city, whether an unwelcome statistic or scary anecdote, Adams blames bail reform and Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg.
I digress! Back to migration. So, with migrants massing at the Southern border and filling up Texas facilities, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott came up with a stunning bit of sadistic political theater, bussing asylum seekers to New York. And then he and his border guards encouraged more and more to come North, citing New York’s status as a sanctuary city.
“As the mayor of New York, I have to provide services families that are here, and that's what we're going to do - our responsibility as a city, and I'm proud that this is a Right to Shelter state, and we're going continue to do that,” Adams said last August.
As summer turned to fall, and the busses kept coming, he flipped completely, confirming every cliche about liberals who talk a big game about their superior values and then break the moment it impacts them. A brilliant political stunt by the grubby little troll in Texas, indeed.
First, Adams tried to kill the city’s right-to-shelter. He said migrants would “destroy” the city and told residents that the price tag of taking in the current numbers would necessitate cuts to programs for native New Yorkers. He recently embarked on a tour of Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, to discourage asylum seekers from coming to the city. “There’s no more room,” he said in Puebla, Mexico.
"We are about to experience a financial … tsunami that I don’t think the city has ever experienced," Adams said in September. "Every service in this city is going to be impacted from child service to our seniors to housing. Everything will be impacted.”
The idea that spending more money to welcome migrants necessitates cuts to social programs that benefit native New Yorkers—who by virtue of having randomly been born one place instead of another are somehow more deserving—sounds right. It’s one of those things that’s obviously true to everyone but dumb “woke” teenagers, but it’s wrong. Migrants are “expensive” because the labyrinthine asylum process either bans them from working or opening bank accounts outright or makes their lives so difficult they can’t be productive members of the economy. And even still they’re so enterprising many of them work, and therefor spend, under the table.
A family that comes to America from a different country is cheaper than an American family, if we’re going to discuss people like monetary units. Take education: in an immigrant family of two parents and three kids, we’re responsible for K-12 of three people. An American-born family costs 5 people worth of K-12.
Here we’re talking near future. There is literally no respected economists that thinks immigrants are anything but a boost longterm.
But politicians don’t operate long-term. And so, Adams and the right-wing rags are running around trying to convince—successfully, according to polling—the public that asylum seekers constitute a crisis. It’s like he’s generating his own little Shock Doctrine.” No room at the shelter? Cuts to after school programs? It’s the migrants!
Let’s take a look at history, and see if anything seems familiar. This is part of research for a book proposal about Cold War escapees (which my grandparents were) in the larger context of 20th century migration patterns. TL;DR: just like the current “crisis” in the U.S. and Western Europe, asylum seekers are welcomed only as so far as they can be used as propaganda tools—when they’re no longer the “right” kind of migrant, there’s suddenly no more room. This is because Western “democracies” pivot between right-wingers who fuel cultural resentments and liberals that fold in the face of right-wing attacks, who then claim that while they deeply care about the plight of migrants searching for a better life, they must secure economic benefits for “real" Germans or Dutch people or French or, now, New Yorkers.
Here’s a little history. In 1952, the United States created the “US Escapee Program (USEP). “Each refugee from the Soviet orbit represents a denial of the inevitably of the communist system,” officials argued.
“After evading the dogs and shoot-on-sight patrols and after crossing the barbed wire entanglements, mine fields and other barriers designed to prevent escape, the escapee, hungry, empty handed, destitute,” wrote wrote Edward W. Lawrence Chief, Program Division, Office of Field Coordination, Escapee Program. “Inadequately clothed, often sick and ill nourished, is offered friendly assistance of a welfare nature and, even more important, hope for the future.”
Lawrence noted that it was best for the escapees to remain in Europe. From the start, the propaganda potential of individual escapees was held in uneasy balance with fears about mass migration.
Harry S. Truman warned of the economic and cultural upheavals created in Europe by escapees. He said that aid would be given to ease refugees settlement in Western Europe, emphasizing that, “a substantial number of them want to stay in Europe and should have the chance to do so,” a subtle nod to assuage concerns that America would be overrun.
Suffice to say, U.S. interests were prioritized over a humanitarian commitment to freedom of movement. In 1955, state department documents show approximately 1,000 refugees held in Yugoslavia in “concentration camp conditions.” Pressured to repatriate them, the Yugoslavians agreed to let them go West instead. But where? The U.S. called on Italy, Austria, Greece and France to be good neighbors and take them in. And the aid they were willing to provide too had its limits: only 15 percent of the USEP office’s budget would go to these particular refugees, as they were not “greatly important.”
Fears of invasion multiplied exponentially when Black and brown migrants from Europe’s collapsed empires began to seek new lives in the West. “The presence of migrant workers in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal reflected decades or even centuries of colonial rule and the two-way traffic that it had enabled,” writes Peter Gatrell in Unsettling Europe. In the 1960s, migrant workers from North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa sought work in France. “Some will be happy here. Others may encounter death,” one migrant bluntly told filmmakers for the 1962 film Travaillers Africains.
The Algerian revolution also sent migrants to France. At the same time authorities demanded assimilation—forcing women to abandon hijabs, for example—the color of the migrants’ skin made this demand virtually impossible. “It was surreal: in the heart of a beautiful Parisian neighborhood, a black tribe and a horde of roaring mastodons were looking for garbage,” wrote Banine in the 1968 book Unfamiliar France. “So how are they adapting to their new life? We can guess: poorly,” he concluded.
Mid-century British claimed to view members of the commonwealth—their colonies—as “family.” But when “family” from the Caribbean, India, and other former colonies relocated to Great Britain, the British were less than welcoming. A slew of racist riots and high-profile killings of immigrants brought the point home.
“I had never hoped to challenge the whites in Jamaica for a job,” wrote an immigrant in London Is the Place for Me. “[But in Britain] if the white man was sweeping the street, then any job I asked for would mean a challenge for him. I was not one of the ‘mother country’s children.’ I was one of her black children.”
“Countries needed migrant workers, but nation-states did not want to extend citizenship to newcomers,” Gattrell observes.
Xenophobia was easily dressed up as economic equity for real countrymen.
“The UK is small and densely populated, with high social standards secured in the Welfare State,” read a British Home Office briefing paper. “The maintenance of these standards is an objective of policy and would not be compatible with allowing anyone to come and settle here who felt inclined to.”
In the 1970s, economic insecurity, spurred in part by the OPEC embargo, super-charged nativism in the West. Suddenly, Europe had less room. “We should carefully consider where the ability of our society to absorb has been exhausted and where social common sense and responsibility dictate that the process be stalled,” said German chancellor Willy Brandt in 1973. In 1976 Sweden, border guards were told to pick out “Non-Nordic” citizens based on their hair, shoes and clothing. In 1974, French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing banned workers from abroad.
Anti-immigrant sentiment culminated in the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who openly blamed France’s woes on immigrants during the 1980s. “Give us France back, damn it!” his daughter, Marine Le Pen, and successor as head of the National Front party, exclaimed in 2017. Donald Trump won the 2016 election by ranting about immigrant rapists.
And here we are. Blue, “Sanctuary City” New York, built by immigrants from all over the world, every generation, since the start of the city’s founding, is telling the public they should choose between humane immigration policy and meals for seniors and after-school programs.